


A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters

by dellaxstreet



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angry!Johanna, Everything Hurts But You Knew That, Excessive Profanity, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5141600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaxstreet/pseuds/dellaxstreet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johanna Mason's hatred of Katniss Everdeen is a lot more complicated than she'd like to admit. Some of it comes down to having a person hold a mirror up to the parts of you that you'd rather not examine, ever again - and the rest is irrelevant, because they all have expiration dates stamped on their foreheads, right? </p>
<p>(This was originally intended to be the first chapter of a longer piece, and one day I might come back to it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not Suzanne Collins, I just think this story needed more lesbian subtext. The title is taken from a quotation by Adrienne Rich, though I almost named this "You really are sweet as fucking pie, aren't you?" for a minute there.

The hatred that rose up in Johanna Mason the moment she laid eyes on the Girl on Fire would have been remarkable, if the sun-bronzed idiot perched beside her didn’t think it was so damned _funny._

“Who do they think they’re kiddng?” she hissed softly, refusing to acknowledge Finnick’s quiet laughter at the sneer on her face or the roll of her eyes when the chariot slid by. The flames roared out behind them, and – “Are they _holding hands_? How is anyone buying that? This isn’t a fucking date!”

Unconsciously, Johanna’s gaze flicked to her own tributes. Dressed up like trees, again. Never mind that they’d been trees for forty straight years, and nobody had been able to tell the imbecile planning these outfits that people didn’t bet on trees. Trees looked plenty solid until you hacked them down, and in the meantime, they sure as shit weren’t threatening. Trees just kind of stood there and put out oxygen, they didn’t win the annual False Hope Kiddie Deathmatch. And tributes dressed like trees didn’t come back alive.

Not that she cared. Not by now.

Those kids had expiration dates stamped onto their foreheads, and so did this girl. Just because Haymitch was finally sober enough to have a halfway coherent thought and get them to do something different with this year’s half-starved cannon fodder didn’t mean she had a snowball’s chance in a volcano.

Johanna’s lips curled into a snarl as the camera panned to her, radiating hostility from every line of her body as she shifted, looking dead into the lens. Let _them_ look away first, let them see what kind of things that got bred in the arena. Some gray-eyed waif wasn’t going to last five minutes, and neither was the boy with his hand wrapped around hers. She hated that girl with every fiber of her being, from her braid to her boots. She hated that rail-thin frame and she hated the look in her eyes.

Katniss Everdeen moved like she didn’t really know how to take up space on camera, like having anyone look straight at her and not flinch away was a surprise. She looked like being soft was unsettling, like they’d painted her to be a little girl when the storm behind her eyes said all she knew was how to be rough and distant. Who did she think she was? Where did she get off being on that high horse, standing up on that stage and talking about how she loved somebody enough to risk being slaughtered for them?

Johanna hated her. It wound knots around her throat to watch, no, to think – goddamn her. Goddamn her for being magnetic and startled when she smiled. Goddamn her for making some moon-eyed boy stare at her that way, like they were both still children and the Capitol hadn’t snapped them in half yet.

“ _Fuck her,”_ she spat under her breath, watching it all unfold, hating that this girl was clever. Hating that she was strong. For a moment, she imagined just taking an axe and putting it in Everdeen’s _self-righteous, self-sacrificing, selfless_ face. Maybe then she’d stop looking into the camera and having courage behind her eyes. Maybe then she’d stop protecting a boy who was  _weak_ from the start, who she should have left to  _die_. Maybe then she’d stop being so _fucking noble_  and yet  _so goddamned driven_  at the same time.

That  _stupid defiant little bitch_.

The ones Johanna had sent into that meat grinder came out again in coffins, the way they always did, because they never listened. They were too thin and too stupid and too young to get away from that pack of wolves, and she’d known it, but when she ran into Finnick five minutes later and threatened to put a cheese knife through his jugular, he still gave her that look. The one that said he thought he knew what she was thinking, but wanted to keep all his appendages attached, so he didn’t say it out loud.

“Don’t kill me in here, you’ll get blood on the carpet,” was his answer, mouth stretched into a smile that would have been charming if she didn’t know that there was something coiled behind it. In that flash of teeth was an unspoken thing of malice. It said sometimes, when they both looked at another person up close, they thought _It would be so easy to gut you from here._ And if they did, the rest of these freaks would be more worried about the upholstery than about the corpse on the living room floor.

Her tributes were dead, and eventually his were, too. Eventually it was just one moronic girl from District Twelve weaving flowers into a dead child’s hair, like she didn’t even understand, before the cameras cut away, what she was doing. How far she was pushing things. Johanna stared at the screen, at her cozied up to Bread Boy, like there was room for sentiment in that fucking place. She felt a scream build and then die in her throat at those berries in that girl’s hand, the way she wouldn’t leave him.

Why wouldn’t she let him die, just do what everyone else would do, just _kill him for fuck’s sakes_? Why, when everyone else in Panem had to play that game of the devil’s arithmetic, figuring out how many people they were willing to let die, did she think she could do this? What gave Katniss Everdeen the right to do what _no one else_ had ever done?

But she looked at the strength of will in those eyes, and she saw someone who wanted nothing more than to save her own goddamned skin. Yet this schoolgirl would risk everything, just to save this one _moron_?

No, it was worse. It was so much worse, she realized. In this one stubborn tribute, Johanna saw someone who wouldn’t have let them pull the trigger, who might have taken those bullets herself. She saw someone who wouldn’t cower. She saw, and it brought back things long buried, and she _hated_ The Girl on Fire.

She hated her _so fucking much._

 


End file.
